Friday Vocabulary

1. phobogenous — induced by fear

The meeting with his prospective in-laws wasn’t going well, Timmy realized, as the phobogenous sweat rolled down his temples and into the collar of his shirt.

 

2. hypocaust — hollowed flooring into which heated air was sent to raise the temperature of a room or bath (in ancient Rome)

I suppose you could—given enough money, anything is possible—build a hypocaust with wooden flooring, but the disadvantages seem quite obvious.

 

3. peascod — pod of the pea including the seeds

You cannot eat peascods as you would an edamame appetizer, for the peas will simply be squashed within the pod.

 

4. littoral — of or relating to the shore or the shoreline region

Hasp Freedly, a stereotypical sailor infamous for his littoral womanizing, seemed at a loss on the dance floor in our new landlocked refuge.

 

5. foison — plenty, abundance; plentiful harvest; vitality

May we always enjoy the rich foison of nature which seems ever-present when we seek humbly only for our needs.

 

6. antecubital — of that part of the arm on the other side from the elbow

I prefer having blood drawn from the thick (in my case, at least) vein in the antecubital fossa, to having a damnable finger stick which will pain me all day if not longer.

 

7. curtilage — ground surrounding a dwelling, sometimes including outbuildings, considered the same as the residence itself

The discovery of the stolen motorbike was thrown out on Fourth Amendment grounds, because although the garage door was open, the garage was deemed part of the curtilage thus making the warrantless search inadmissible.

 

8. xerostomia — dry mouth

Xerostomia and the munchies are a bad combination when no beverages are available.

 

9. gasolier — gas burning chandelier

I had no envy for the servant responsible for lighting the forty-eight burners of the huge brass gasolier which stood ponderously over our heads.

 

10. spokeshave — two-handled cutting implement with blade in the middle, used for shaping wheel spokes or other curved edges of wood

From the doorway I thought she was running a spokeshave across her upper thigh, only realizing as I neared that it was a steel bar similar to those used in the Graston Technique, and that she was massaging away knots from her muscles.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. budge — lambskin fur

Master Pieter sat at his counting table in a warm green houppelande trimmed sensibly with black budge, holding the letter tightly in his left hand, its seal intact.

 

2. pottle — former liquid measure equal to a half-gallon; vessel of this capacity

We split a pottle of sack while he told me of his scheme.

 

3. bradykinin — peptide hormone that mediates inflammation

Scientists are now researching whether fluid build-up in the lungs of COVID-19 patients may result from problems of bradykinin regulation.

 

4. wanhope — despair, hopelessness

I was beset by waves of wanhope and felt I could not even lift my helpless head to look towards God in His heaven.

 

5. toll — to lure, to attract, to decoy

And so the two pretended enemies worked together to toll into their snare any ignorant farmer who thought to make a few pennies gambling at the fair.

 

6. esker — gravel ridges formed by glaciers

Ireland was divided nearly in twain by the broad esker running from Dublin to Galway.

 

7. perseverate — to repeat endlessly or insistently

And if I tried just to ignore him, he would perseverate my name ad infinitum—”John! John! John! John!”—until I would finally give up and ask him, “What?!?”, at which point he would once more resume his discussion of the second Lego movie.

 

8. bride — thread or threads connecting parts of lacework

A cocklebur had become entangled with the brides of her lace collar.

 

9. pelf — property; booty, spoils

Neither love nor pelf will make me turn aside from the course of honor.

 

10. foozle — to bungle, esp. in golf

He walked over to the counter and foozled his approach to the attractive blonde, slipping on the freshly waxed tile and falling backwards onto his poor sacroiliac.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

pari possu — side by side; equally

The loosening of restrictions needs to progress pari passu with the build-up of medical tracking and infrastructure.

Friday Vocabulary

1. carphology — plucking at bed linen while in a delirious state

While Ophelia’s plucking of flowers may seem only another version of carphology and a sign of underlying madness, her all-too-cogent comments in the language of flowers prove that there is more method than madness in the scene.

 

2. vesicant — blister producing substance

Certain chemotherapy drugs, such as Amsacrine, can cause tissue necrosis if vesicant extravasation occurs.

 

3. dactyloscopic — of or related to fingerprints

By this time, the files of the Sûreté boasted a huge collection of dactylscopic records.

 

4. diekplous (also diekplus) — ancient naval battle maneuver in which a line of galleys rows between ships in an opposing line so as to attack the enemy’s weaker stern and sides; sometimes thought to be a maneuver wherein a single war galley shipps oars on one side and turns at the last minute to shear off an opposing ship’s oars

Though the evolution was much lauded in ancient times, only three instances of a successful diekplous were ever recorded.

 

5. expectant — (in medical triage) expected to die

It is extremely unlikely for a BZ gas victim to present as an expectant patient.

 

6. obtund — to dull, to blunt

The rich food and fine wine obtunded my innate wariness, and I agreed too readily to his proposal.

 

7. mydriasis — overlarge pupil dilation

As I stared deeply into her brown eyes, I hoped her mydriasis was a side effect of love, and not of the dim lighting.

 

8. râle — crackling sound heard in unhealthy lungs during auscultation

The inventor of the stethoscope likened râles to the sound of crackling salt on a hot dish.

 

9. wharfinger — person in charge of a wharf

Everyone knew that Jack Callen, the wharfinger, was not entirely honest ready to look the other way for ready cash in hand.

 

10. pelisse — short fur-lined military jacket, often worn over one shoulder by light cavalry; long ladies coat with Empire waist

His lady descended from the carriage in her dark, velvet pelisse, one arm still in her fur muff as the other held the doorframe to assist her exit.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. messuage — dwelling house along with its outbuildings and attached lands dedicated to household use

We had a small messuage in my youth, though to be fair the only outbuilding was a leaky prefab toolshed poorly placed in the sloping backyard.

 

2. byre — shed for cows

The beeves in the byre became restless, suddenly awake and uncertain as to why.

 

3. machan — hunting platform in tree

My client kept nipping from his flask whenever he thought I wouldn’t notice, and soon I began to worry that he would take a drunken tumble from the machan and break his neck at the base of the tree.

 

4. chape — metal point folded over or sometimes enclosing the tip of a sword scabbard

Though we found several chapes and a brooch near the remains of the largest fire, the digging revealed no swords or pieces of swords.

 

5. clerestory — upper part of building rising above interior space so as to allow the entry of daylight through high windows

Looking up from his paper as he sat in his easy chair, he could just make out through the rightmost window of the clerestory a small bird, perhaps a finch, clinging to the highest branch of the lemon tree, bobbing up and down in the morning wind coming in from the ocean.

 

6. yester — (archaic) of or relating to yesterday

I found it difficult to believe that it was only yester noon that I had first met this chap who already seemed to be a bosom friend.

 

7. defervesce — to experience abatement of fever

Finally the patient defervesced and I was able to reassure the family that the crisis had passed.

 

8. thitherward — toward that place; on the way thither

Boney thought he’d seen a shallower place upstream about a half mile, so we retraced our weary steps thitherward and I tried not to despair of reaching the battalion in time.

 

9. foreweary (also forweary) — to make tired at an earlier time

Robie and Paskell, unused to the rigors of the march and forewearied by carrying the heavy teak commode up the side of the mountain, laid down by the fire and almost immediately both fell asleep.

 

10. jess — short leather strap tied around each leg of a hunting hawk, usu. with ring for attaching bird to its perch

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to put jesses on that wild bird, but I fear that she’ll never be tamed.”

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British slang)

sprog — child; [RAF] young recruit

They imagined they were tough, these beastly sprogs in their baggy tracksuits, but all their pretended menace they’d learned from music videos and Ali G.

Friday Vocabulary

1. indite — to compose, to create a literary composition; (obsolete) to dictate

A review of the cuneiform records reveals that the governor of the far-flung province continued to indite missives imploring the High King to send aid long after the military disaster.

 

2. epistemology — science of the origin and method of knowledge

Epicurus dethroned Reason as the arbiter of truth, giving that role to Nature in his epistemology.

 

3. arrogate — to claim without right, to take without justification

We should not arrogate a complete understanding of the universe, but should recognize that our vision and comprehension may be only partial and perhaps misguided at times.

 

4. view-halloo — hunter’s cry upon spying the fox break cover

“There it is!” he shouted as a prosaic view-halloo when he saw his suitcase land on the baggage carousel.

 

5. cremocarp — type of fruit development in which two one-seeded mericarps hang from a central axis

Carrot ‘seeds’ are found in a cremocarp covered by coarse hairy growth which will bind them together.

 

6. bashaw — pasha; imperious man

“The Bashaw of Tripoli shall deliver up to the American squadron now off Tripoli, all the Americans in his possession.” (from the peace treaty ending the First Barbary War, 1805)

 

7. pavane — solemn and stately dance

On the warehouse floor the robots and the humans who served them once more entered into their colorless pavane of commerce.

 

8. hoodwink — to blindfold, to cover eyes with a hood; to deceive, to trick

Josiah realized his own prejudices had hoodwinked him, and now the real culprits were far away while he had arrested this innocent in his unreasoning fury.

 

9. tergiversation — apostasy, abandonment of a cause; turning dishonorably from straightforward action or principles, equivocation

My opponent’s change of heart regarding ice cream parlor licenses is an example of his flip-flop politics, if not outright tergiversation from his supposed ideals.

 

10. artful — wily, deceitful

We may support Odysseus, but then we have never been the victim of his artful schemes.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. purl — to flow with whirling motion; to flow and burble

They sat together on a small blanket spread out upon the grassy bank, watching the gentle brook as it purled through the mossy rocks on its lazy way to the lake.

 

2. coppice — copse, thicket or underwood grown for intermittent cutting

The dogs ran off at once into the tangled coppice to our left and we tried to follow, cursing and tearing our clothes in the process.

 

3. skewbald — marked with patches of white and brown

Jerome’s skewbald pony stood hobbled near the oak, and the embers in the fire still produced a thin trail of smoke, but no other sign of the preacher did we see.

 

4. behoovely — necessary, fitting [appears to be a hapax legomenon used only by Julian of Norwich]

The rough parts of the road are behoovely though this may be clear to us only at our final destination.

 

5. cotta — surplice, often with box pleats

The mass of seminarians, stern yet joyful in their cassocks and cottas, strode across the greensward before the assembled parents and other well-wishers.

 

6. farthingale — hooped petticoat or frame worn beneath a woman’s skirts to extend them

Although there is no evidence that Henry IV of France hid beneath the farthingale of Marguerite de Valois, the wife of another Henry IV—Joan of Portugal, wife of Henry IV of Castile—is credited with originating the bizarre fashion trend, perhaps to hide embarrassing pregnancies.

 

7. surrebuttal — (Law) plaintiff’s response to a defendant’s rebuttal

In any true debate there should be provision made for (at the very least) argument, rebuttal, and surrebuttal.

 

8. instauration — renewal, restoration; [obsolete] the establishing or instituting (of something)

After the devilish depredations of money upon science and education, a true instauration of those once hallowed institutions will take decades, if such is even possible at all.

 

9. batture — alluvial land raised from sea-bed or river-bed; specifically, land between Mississippi River and the levees

The major’s plan was to move his troops across the batture at low tide and surprise the enemy from the rear, but he reckoned without the difficulty of slogging through the mud and muck.

 

10. farctate — absolutely full

And into this farctate container he sought to insert just one more book, just a single slim volume of poetry, at which point the cardboard gave way and the entire box split apart.

 

Book List: 500 Books

As I told you over a month ago, I recently reading book #500 in my reading records since I began tracking back in June of 2015. When I announced this milestone, I promised both an analysis for the last hundred books read and a listing of the books themselves. This post is in fulfillment of the latter half of that promise. (As usual, I do not include comics and graphic novels as ‘books’ in my count, though they are listed below.)

I have already mentioned the circumstances (see above link) under which I acquired The Poor Pay More, a study of buying habits of the lower class in New York City’s ‘projects’. This book capped off the last hundred books I have read (not counting those read since September 12, when I finished the David Caplovitz sociology book), a century of books which began with the wonderful Philip K. Dick non-genre fiction book, Confessions of a Crap Artist, which I read back in January. (Which month seems so very, very long ago.) I wrote about it on this blog at the time Also of note in the first ten books of the last hundred read was the Tim Powers’s fiction (I find it hard to classify), On Stranger Tides, which I finally got around to reading. It turns out to be much, much better than I was expecting after viewing the transmogrified story in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
401 1/19/20 Philip K. Dick Confessions of a Crap Artist Fiction
402 1/21/20 Poul Anderson Agent of the Terran Empire SF & Fantasy
403 1/22/20 James O. Causey Frenzy Mystery
404 1/23/20 Tim Powers On Stranger Tides SF & Fantasy
405 1/28/20 Marjorie Kelly The Divine Right of Capital Business
406 1/28/20 Stephen Vincent Benét The Devil And Daniel Webster Fiction
407 1/30/20 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s April 1930, Vol. I No. 7 Books
408 1/30/20 Daniel Manus Pinkwater The Magic Moscow Children’s
409 1/31/20 Vance Randolph & Nancy Clemens The Camp-Meeting Murders Mystery
410 2/2/20 Judith Moffett The Ragged World SF & Fantasy

 

Besides the two Wilkie Collins books, which I have already written about, the highlight of the next ten books in this listing is The Modern Story Book, a children’s book for the modern child, featuring as protagonists the new machines of transportation that this crazy 20th Century has (had) engendered. Besides the obvious stories about cars, planes, and trains, we see the anthropomorphic musings and wanderings of a brave dirigible, a bored elevator car, and an old piece of farm machinery. Illustrated with the same clear lines and bright colors that made the My Book House series such a delight, the texts are fables for the wondrous machine age, sparkling futurism without (much) fascism. (Though the elevator does learn the perils of stepping too far outside his appointed role.)

Another wonderful children’s book was The Tale of Two Bad Mice, fifth in Beatrix Potter’s delightful illustrated stories. There seems to be an especial moral in this humorous adventure of two mice who find a perfectly sized house which is filled with fake food and other unrealities; unfortunately, I am now too old to comprehend morals. I was heartened in this past century of books to have access once more to the shelves upon which rest my children’s books.

This second decade of books also saw me get back to my comic books, including my penultimate guilty pleasure, the Badger. (My guiltiest reading pleasure, of course, being the Dray Prescot books of Alan Burt Akers.)
I’ve also been perusing some of my Amar Chitra Katha collection, but I should note that the actual content of Dasharatha includes nothing like the William Tell story shown on the cover of the comic.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
411 2/2/20 Pentagram Cryptography Spies
412 2/3/20 Wilkie Collins Miss or Mrs? Fiction
413 2/5/20 Wallace Wadsworth; Ruth Eger, illustrator The Modern Story Book Mystery
414 2/5/20 Thomas Campbell II Bad Girls Of Pulp Fiction Books
415 2/9/20 Nicolas Freeling Gun Before Butter Mystery
416 2/10/20 Georges Simenon Enigmes Foreign Language
417 2/12/20 R. T. Campbell Bodies in a Bookshop Mystery
418 2/13/20 Wilkie Collins The Guilty River Fiction
419 2/13/20 Beatrix Potter The Tale of Two Bad Mice Children’s
2/15/20 Lopamudra Chandralalat: The Prince With A Moon On His Forehead Comics
420 2/16/20 Margaret Frazer The Outlaw’s Tale Mystery
2/16/20 Anant Pai, ed. Dasharatha: The Story Of Rama’s Father Comics
2/16/20 Mike Baron Badger #1 [Capital] Comics

 

I’ve already written about almost half of the next ten books on my reading list, including the small but punchy Penguin paperback pictured here, Hazell and the Menacing Jester. That one impressed me so much I even culled together a list of the rhyming and other cockney slang found therein, to which I hope to add when I read the first in this all-too-short trilogy of books. The P. B. Yuill mystery was only one of the many excellent books that made up this third decade of my fifth hundred.

One terrific book I haven’t reported upon is The Blue Lotus, the 5th volume in the Tintin bande desinée series by Hergé. Not only does this sequel to Cigars of the Pharaoh demonstrate the clear lines and detail-packed frames one associates with the Belgian cartoonist, but the insights into Chinese society on the cusp of communism are fascinating. The Japanese invaders come off poorly in this book, but no more poorly than they deserve.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
421 2/17/20 Erle Stanley Gardner (as A. A. Fair) Turn On The Heat Mystery
422 2/19/20 A. Bertram Chandler The Inheritors / The Gateway To Never SF & Fantasy
423 2/21/20 Rex Stout Too Many Clients Mystery
424 2/5/20 P. B. Yuill Hazell and the Menacing Jester Mystery
3/2/20 Hergé The Blue Lotus Comics
3/2/20 Goscinny & Uderzo Asterix in Belgium Comics
425 3/7/20 Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning Feeble
426 3/9/20 Friar Tuck’s Christmas Series Puppy Dog’s ABC Children’s
427 3/9/20 Bill Fawcett, ed. Cats in Space and Other Places SF & Fantasy
428 3/12/20 Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey SF & Fantasy
429 3/13/20 Beatrix Potter The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle Children’s
430 3/16/20 Anita Brenner The Wind that Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1942 History

 

More good books in the next set of ten, though I never did get back to report on the other stories in Candide, Zadig and selected stories. (If you read “Zadig” and “Ingenuous” you’ll have read the best of the lot, though admittedly that best is very, very good.) Another thing I have yet to get back to is reading the French original of The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Many reviewers have been dissatisfied by this tiny mystery by Gaston Leroux, but I found it to be a surprising and satisfying solution to a locked room puzzle, which is really all one can ask from that particular subgenre. The English translation, however, seemed to me to flawed at places, so I want to read the original to determine if either the dryness and flawed language is an artifact of translation or a feature of the original. The third possibility, of course, is that my grasp of the French language will be so abysmal as to leave me forever in doubt.

During this slice I also continued my comic book reading—which, as I’ve pointed out before and will continue to mention, do not count towards the official “Books Read” tally—with the two-part Marvel adaptation of the Buckaroo Banzai movie, which was … meh, I guess. The artists managed to make Peter Weller’s character look like Weller, but try to recognize Jeff Goldblum on the cover of issue #1 shown here. He’s the tall one. The resemblance isn’t present on the inside, either. (Not that I don’t keep count of the comic books and graphic novels, though. For example, the next-to-last entry in this slice of ten (official) Books Read is the Lego … ahem, brick-based Catechism of the Seven Sacraments, which was #499 of all books and comics read since starting this meaningless tracking project.)

 

# Read Author Title Genre
431 3/18/20 Arthur C. Clarke Prelude to Space SF & Fantasy
432 3/23/20 R. W. Morgan Saint Paul in Britain Wacko
433 3/26/20 Rudy Rucker The Hollow Earth SF & Fantasy
434 3/26/20 R. Austin Freeman Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes Mystery
435 3/28/20 Andre Norton The Crossroads Of Time SF & Fantasy
436 4/1/20 Gaston Leroux The Mystery of the Yellow Room Mystery
437 4/4/20 William J. Locke Simon The Jester Fiction
4/9/20 Bill Mantio, pencils by Mark Texeira, inks by Armando Gil Buckaroo Banzai #1 Comics
4/11/20 Bill Mantio, pencils by Mark Texeira, inks by Armando Gil Buckaroo Banzai #2 Comics
438 4/14/20 Voltaire Candide, Zadig and selected stories Fiction
439 4/14/20 Texe Marrs Project L. U. C. I. D.: The Beast 666 Universal Human Control System Wacko
4/19/20 Mary O’Neill & Kevin O’Neill Catechism of the Seven Sacraments Comics
440 4/21/20 Ellery Queen The Scarlet Letters / The Glass Village Mystery

 

The next tranche of books leading up to the half-century mark held many solid and highly readable volumes, including Book #441 in my reading, Three Of Us. This very basic primer from the California state textbooks program of the 1950s (and perhaps the ’40s; I only know that my copy was printed in 1954) deserves to stand alongside Dick and Jane for its blithely happy-go-lucky white kids learning and having fun. Sorry, having fun! This one came to me as a gift from a longtime educator who was cleaning out the closets. (It’s true: I will read almost anything.) You’ll note that it has too many authors.

I began The Saga of Gisli the Outlaw because I was watching the second season of Trapped, though I finished the Icelandic TV series long before I completed the Icelandic saga. The sagas of Iceland are great, and this one is no exception, though I found keeping track of the Who’s Who even more difficult than usual (my usual being Njal’s Saga). The penurious bonds of outlawry reminded me of the exile of the Pandava brothers, though the tragic workings of ineluctable fate pulled my heartstrings more for Gisli—doubtless only because of my Western bias.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
441 4/21/20 Guy L. Bond, Grace A. Dorsey, Marie C. Cuddy, & Kathleen Wise Three Of Us Children’s
442 4/25/20 Steven Brust Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille SF & Fantasy
4/28/20 Hergé The Broken Ear Comics
443 4/29/20 Terry Deary The Groovy Greeks History
444 5/1/20 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s May 1930, Vol. I No. 8 Books
445 5/2/20 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s Book Shop June 1930, Vol. I No. 9 Books
446 5/4/20 George Johnston, trans.; Peter Foote, notes & essay The Saga of Gisli the Outlaw History
447 5/5/20 Isaac Asimov Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection SF & Fantasy
448 5/5/20 Lawrence Block Burglars Can’t Be Choosers Mystery
449 5/7/20 Lloyd Alexander Taran Wanderer SF & Fantasy
450 5/10/20 Conrad Richter The Sea of Grass Western

 

I wrote not a word about the good books in the next ten on my list—only taking a moment to write about what may be the worst book I have ever read—partly because I started to read some of the dregs of my collection (looking at you, supposed self-help books), and partly because of my life circumstances, which changed in May of this year in a fairly minor way, but which necessitated a drastic modification of my sleeping (and thus my typing) schedule. This decade of books started off with a real winner, however, The Day The World Ended, an engrossing account of the surprisingly forgotten volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique in 1902. The two British authors, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, went on to write similar tomes about disastrous events ranging from the San Francisco earthquake to the Crash of 1929. They are in top form in this tale of bureaucratic inertia and buck-passing that made a natural disaster into a much worse human tragedy.

I hope some day to read the ebook of the new translation of Solaris by Bill Johnston, to compare it with the English translation that has been available since 1970. The latter version, which Lem disliked, was a translation of a translation, being rendered into English not from the Polish original, but from a French translation of the supposedly seminal 1961 Science Fiction novel. Thus my wish to read the new version since learning of Johnston’s direct translation. But, as they say, if wishes were horses we’d be up to our shoulders in horseshit. Strangely enough, the new version is available only as an ebook or as an audiobook due to bizarre copyright restrictions hovering around the original English version. But I acquired a copy with some Amazon credits, and read the earlier version—which I’d read before—in preparation for the comparison. Still haven’t read the ‘electronic’ version yet; I dislike electronic ‘books’.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
451 5/17/20 Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan Witts The Day The World Ended History
452 5/18/20 Lawrence Block Random Walk: A Novel For The New Age Fiction
453 5/19/20 Norman Lewis How To Become A Better Reader Books
454 5/23/20 M. Scott Peck Abounding Grace: An Anthology Of Wisdom Spirituality
455 5/23/20 Stanislaw Lem Solaris SF & Fantasy
456 5/24/20 Donna Leon Death at La Fenice Mystery
457 5/25/20 Scott Jeffrey Journey to the Impossible: Designing an Extraordinary Life Self-Help
458 5/25/20 Ian Livingstone, ed. White Dwarf No 34 D&D
459 5/26/20 More Soviet Science Fiction SF & Fantasy
460 5/30/20 Phoebe Atwood Taylor Deathblow Hill Mystery

 

Happily the next ten books contained more wonderful reading than the previous ten, though once again I only managed to write about one of those books (and not the best, and I actually wrote nothing, only quoted the book itself). Among the great reads were a couple from my guiltiest pleasure, the Dray Prescot series by the pseudonymous Alan Burt Akers. In this ‘cycle’—the Krozair Cycle—Prescot is flung into the great battle between the Red and the Green along the shores and on the waters of the Eye Of The World, that great inland sea which also was the scene of one of Dray’s first adventures on the distant planet of Kregen. Anyway …. Seriously, you should check it out. Kenneth Bulmer (the real author behind the nom de plume) is in love with language and adventure, and it shows.

I also worked my way through some religious tracts to see if they might be gotten rid of, but the slightly off works of Mr. Thieme turn out to be of interest. His strange proselytizing for the peculiar views he espouses might be off-putting to most, but he manages to back up most of his weird claims fairly with the usual bible quotes, though he obviously knows little about other religions than Christianity save that they are bad. All in all, a fun read.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
461 6/2/20 Beatrix Potter The Pie and the Patty-Pan Children’s
462 6/3/20 Alan Burt Akers The Tides of Kregen SF & Fantasy
463 6/5/20 Fiona Buckley The Doublet Affair History
464 6/9/20 Alan Burt Akers Renegade of Kregen SF & Fantasy
465 6/9/20 Donna Leon Death in a Strange Country Mystery
466 6/10/20 R. B. Thieme, Jr. Heathenism Religion
467 6/13/20 Peter Lovesey The Circle Mystery
468 6/17/20 Fiona Buckley Queen’s Ransom Mystery
6/20/20 The Shazam! Family Archives Volume 1 Comics
469 6/20/20 William P. Strube, Jr. The Star Over The Kremlin Wacko
470 6/22/20 Alex Berenson The Faithful Spy Mystery

 

Whatever may be your feelings and thoughts about Harold Bloom, he is very well acquainted with The Canon of Western Literature, and in How To Read and Why he makes a strenuous case for the importance of not only reading, but of reading the good stuff. Naturally he has strong opinions about just what the good stuff is, but most of us who did not major in Literature are bound to find some new suggestions or just some old authors we always meant to return to. I personally have at least a dozen books I obtained after turning through Bloom’s paean to the best of the written word. He also recommends some translations for works not originally in English.

I was disappointed in The Italian Comedy, a Dover reprint of a translation of Pierre Louis Ducharte’s overview of the Commedia dell’arte. Doubtless the flaws I found in the book are flaws within my own reading skills and knowledge, but I had hoped for better insight into the jaunty escapades of Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot. Unfortunately (for me at least), the author assumes so much prior knowledge, and presents his facts in an almost tabular form, that I had difficulty pulling together the various threads. More literate and cognizant folk will likely find this volume more informative.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
471 6/24/20 Harold Bloom How To Read and Why Literary Criticism
472 6/24/20 Daniel Pinkwater The Magic Goose Children’s
473 6/27/20 Colin Dexter Last Bus to Woodstock Mystery
474 6/29/20 Colin Dexter Last Seen Wearing Mystery
475 6/30/20 John T. Watson, M.D., ed. Book Of Elegant Poetical Extracts Poetry
476 6/30/20 Pierre Louis Duchartre The Italian Comedy Drama
477 7/2/20 Horacio Quiroga The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Fiction
478 7/5/20 Eden Phillpotts The Red Redmaynes Mystery
479 7/12/20 James Swain Grift Sense Mystery
480 7/14/20 Agatha Christie Five Complete Hercule Poirot Novels: Thirteen at Dinner / Murder on the Orient Express / The ABC Murders / Cards on the Table / Death on the Nile Mystery

 

With the final twenty books of the last hundred, we descend into the slough of despond, or at least the Slough of Meh. I’ve been reading—among other things—books I suspected I might just as well be shed of. One of these, which I’ve meant to write about ever since finishing its uninspiring pages, is the preening Peter L. Bernstein’s book on probabilities and money, Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story Of Risk. In truth, there is little remarkable about the book, which ends up being a sort of rambling affair about odds and how to set them, framed by the capitalist idea of economics being the only way to look upon the world and its vagaries. If only, Bernstein laments at one point early in the book, if only the Greeks had taken the next steps in mathematics and had discovered how to analyze risk! Bernstein is also a sloppy explainer of mathematical principles, which makes it all the more surprising that Wiley is the publisher of this trivial tome.

Not entirely satisfying in a completely different way is Lewis Carroll’s The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch. This book collects most of the handmade journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s youth (allowing that term to extend into his early years at college), and shows his remarkable creative talent for nonsense. The scintillating flashes of brilliant ridiculousness, however, only show that some special spark was given to the mediocre math professor when he arrived at the wonderful tales of Alice. Worth reading only for Carroll aficionados (read: nutjobs), of which I aspire to become one.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
481 7/14/20 Michael Moore Stupid White Men …And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! Current Events
482 7/18/20 Max Brand The Overland Kid Western
483 7/23/20 Margaret Frazer The Bishop’s Tale Mystery
484 7/24/20 Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch Fiction
485 7/31/20 Patrizia Rinaldi Three, Imperfect Number Mystery
486 7/31/20 Peter L. Bernstein Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story Of Risk Business
487 8/4/20 Colin Dexter The Silent World Of Nicholas Quinn Mystery
488 8/5/20 Arianna Huffington How To Overthrow The Government Current Events
489 8/10/20 Emile Zola Trois Nouvelles Foreign Language
490 8/12/20 Donna Leon Dressed For Death Mystery

 

The final ten books leading up to #500 were not very good, on average. In fact, my average rating for those last ten was 3.0—which is worse than it sounds, given that I have only given a one-star rating a single time in all 500 books. (See the worst book I’ve ever read, mentioned above.) One book that did not drag down the average, however, was Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, a collection of both non-fiction and stories written by the American master on the topic of the Civil War. The narratives in both sections have the resonance of truth, and some of his revelations about the realities of war are usually unspoken by those who have the actual experience of battle. Well worth your time.

On the other hand, The Gift, Book #497 Read, purporting to be by the Sufi poet Hafiz, was both a disappointment and a travesty. As those who wish to delve into the story on the Interwebs can quickly discover, the ‘poems’ are not actually the work of Hafiz, but are verses not quite worthy of Rod McKuen or Richard Bach written (not translated) by one David Landinsky, who used the inspiration of the Persian poet to create these … ahem, verses (as he says) … and uses the name of the same poet to rack up sales of his own work (as he does not say). I’m now going deep into the Gertrude Bell translation of the actual Persian poems from the Divan of Hafiz (sometimes also Hafez), and can see no similarities between the latter and the platitudinous ‘Hang in there, baby’ lines from The Gift. Perhaps the German word was intended.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
491 8/15/20 Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush Current Events
492 8/16/20 Kate Carlisle The Lies That Bind Mystery
493 8/17/20 Ambrose Bierce Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Fiction
8/17/20 Mike Baron Badger #2 [Capital] Comics
8/17/20 Kamala Chandrakant Garuda: The Legend about the Vehicle of Lord Vishnu Comics
494 8/24/20 David Baldacci The Guilty Mystery
495 8/26/20 Ian Fleming Live And Let Die Mystery
8/31/20 Keith Giffen, Andrew Cosby, John Rogers, Johanna Stokes, Joe Casey, & Kevin Church What Were They Thinking?! Comics
496 9/1/20 Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner When to Rob a Bank: And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-intended Rants Business
497 9/1/20 Hafiz [actually David Landinsky] The Gift Poesy
498 9/11/20 Barbara Hambly A Free Man of Color Mystery
499 9/12/20 Noel Botham The Amazing Book of Useless Information: More Things You Didn’t Need to Know But Are About to Find Out Reference
500 9/12/20 David Caplovitz The Poor Pay More Sociology

 

 

The last hundred books seem to have been predominated by Mysteries, and A Free Man Of Color was a surprisingly good one. The actual ratios of the various genres read will come out in my deeper analysis, which I hope to get to by the week after the election, assuming that the world does not end.

 

The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links:

Friday Vocabulary

1. losel — wastrel, scoundrel, profligate

You say you pity him, that sad losel in his cups, but you would not give him a pfennig of concern if you knew the families he has ruined, the wealth he has squandered, and the love he has scorned.

 

2. patten — overshoe of wood or metal once worn to elevate normal footwear above mud etc.

I do hope the council will ban the wearing of pattens within the church, as the sound of the metal footsteps upon the stone is not conducive to thoughts of the holy.

 

3. runagate — runaway, fugitive, deserter; vagabond

While pursuing the runagate my horse shied from a snake, throwing me off and allowing the desperado to make his escape once again.

 

4. shellback — experienced sailor

The old shellback looked out of place in this waterless expanse, still affecting a rolling gait as if to counter the motion of waves which he would never again feel.

 

5. gonfanon — gonfalon suspended from the head of a lance

The saint’s banner was fastened to the top of Sir Michael’s lance in the manner of a gonfanon, and we all knelt down to pray before it, asking for victory in the forthcoming battle.

 

6. grangerize — to add illustrations to a book from other sources

One can look upon grangerized volumes as early examples of scrapbooking, if sticking pictures snipped from other sources into another book can be thus labeled.

 

7. antiscorbutic — agent useful against scurvy

Citrus fruit was known as a powerful antiscorbutic even as early as the first decades of the Age of Exploration in the 16th Century.

 

8. diminuendo — gradually decreasing in loudness

The colonel’s voice now came diminuendo from the speaker, though whether from his movement away from the microphone or from some interference with the radio signal we did not know.

 

9. chapfallen — dejected, dispirited

Smuts looked the chapfallen youth in the eye and said, “You’ve got to go right back in there and face them, and get through the next hour, and then the hour after that.”

 

10. bibliopole — bookseller

Prinnie was a most sagacious bibliopole, knowing better than to express either interest or disdain at first sight of a newly presented tome.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British)

give gyp — to cause pain

You need better shoes, now that you’re working and standing on your feet all day; that’s why your back has been giving you gyp, but a good pair of shoes would fix you right up.

Monday Book Report: Wingman

Wingman, by Manus Pinkwater

The 3rd book I’ve read in the past week to make me cry.

Too short to write too much about, save to say that Daniel Pinkwater (yes, he used his middle name as his first on this book) is an author who can tell a heartwarming tale I can believe in, even after I’ve lived through the Age of Irony and the Age of After and even in the midst of the Age of Whatever-This-Is-Now. Mr. Pinkwater is a genius, or he has a daemon like that of Socrates. This story of a poor Chinese-American kid exiled to the New York Public School system is wonderful. I only hope that the kid kept his comic book collection afterwards.

600 Books (not really)

This book made me cry for democracy. In both the transitive and intransitive senses.

Since I first began tracking my reading after getting all of my books catalogued in a database a little over five years ago, I have treated comics and graphic novels almost as bastard stepchildren, not counting them fully in my ‘Books Read’ statistics. I did, however, note whenever I read such ‘books’, and indeed they are sometimes weighty tomes in their own right, whether we’re discussing Watchmen or the lamentable Kingdom Come. As well, as I said the last time I passed the sur-fictive milestone of 500 Books (not really), I have read plenty of short and very short non-comic books that may tend to inflate the book count. But: No matter. I continue to distinguish my ‘Books Read’ by giving precedence to the non-comics I complete, both because I feel it important to maintain the same statistical methodologies I started with (in which regard, see the problems I had to face when changing underlying data slicing for music listened to), and also because I like it this way. I also have begun tracking total pages read, though I rarely (if ever) report this statistic—one reason being that I do not have the data for the earliest books read, thus causing the very type of data distortion I seek to avoid by changing methodologies now.

Ahem. All this is mere prologue to announcing that the 600th book I’ve read of all types since beginning the count back in June of 2015 is Voting Is Your Super Power!, a truly wonderful compilation from that fantastic comics compiler, Craig Yoe. In this small volume (just over a hundred pages) are found reprints of several ‘citizenship’ comics made for one purpose or another, all with the same message: Voting is important! Along with some wrenching panels from cartoonists as different as Herblock and Winsor McCay, and an introduction by Julie Newmar [!], this book left this reader with tears of pride for the best parts of patriotism. Plus, the comics are great.

I have not forgotten that I owe y’all an analysis and a list of the last hundred books I read up to #500 (using the non-comics counting method, the EBITA—that is, Everything But Illustrated Tomes Analysis). And I’m getting to that just as soon as I finish a little side project. Of course, the comic book collection I just read doesn’t have an official ‘Book Read’ number, but the next book I finished (and the most recent) was The DAW Science Fiction Reader, which was book #528 read—meaning I’m on a blistering pace and better get that analysis finished, eh? See you soon!